A Smattering of Videos

I'm leaving for a week to Arizona for a mission trip so I'm going to leave you with some quality videos to enjoy in my absence. I'll report back on the success of the trip in a about a week or so. Check back after the 7th. Until then enjoy some quality music from...

...Stevie Ray Vaughn (He was a sick guitarist, man. My favorite by far.) doing Crossfire.



...more Stevie doing Voodoo Chile.



...David Crowder. Ever wonder how a song gets written? Here's a chance to see how a great worship song was created and as a bonus, how you can play it, too. Plus, it's Crowder doing a song acoustic, which is always nice. The song is O Praise Him.



...another one from Crowder doing God of Wrath.



Hope you all have a happy new year! Peace.

shalom, matt

Charlie Brown, part 2

Charlie Brown, part 1

Okay, so the last post was a bit depressing. Here's a couple posts that are well worth your time to watch. Quite possibly my favorite cartoon moment of all time. Does it get any better than Linus telling the Christmas story and then in part 2 everyone singing Hark! the Herald Angels Sing? I love it. Take five minutes and find some peace in this simple but profound message.



shalom, matt

Carnival Rides

Do you ever get tired of yourself? I know that sounds like a ridiculous question to even consider, but I'm kind of to that point. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not suicidal or even to the point of self-hatred. I'm just tired of making the same mistakes, over and over, in a never-ending carousel of frustration and disappointment and promises. I want to get off the carousel. It's starting to make me sick. It's ridiculous, really. I gorge myself on crappy, grease-soaked carnival food, hop on a pony for another go-around, and then wonder why I'm staggering away from the ride with the bitter taste of bile and funnel cake in my mouth, looking for the nearest port-o-crapper to vomit behind. Meanwhile, the carny that sold me the food and the ticket to ride is laughing hysterically, while pocketing my money and celebrating his knowledge of the fact that I'll be back again tomorrow night with another fist-full of cash and an insatiable and despised hunger for funnel cakes and carousels.

Know what I mean?

shalom, matt

On Christmas

I love Christmas Eve. It very well could take 1st prize in a favorite-day-of-the-year contest. I think I love it more than Christmas Day itself. I guess I feel a certain connection to the actual Incarnation on Christmas Eve. When the sun goes down and darkness blankets the earth (or half of it anyway) in my mind I am taken back to the defining event in History: God steps into the world. All of the stories of my youth surrounding the Christ event rush back into my mind in vivid detail and color, sight and sound. I'm taken back to my own son's birth, wondering at the similarity, yet vast difference, between Elijah and the birth of Jesus. There is a silence on Christmas Eve, a peace that settles over everyone. For one instant it seems the whole world stops, stands still, and wonders at the miracle of the Incarnation. In that silence I find hope: the hope that I won't always be as I am, that somehow I can be different, that something about that birth changed everything for me and continues to change everything about me. Maybe that's why I love it so much: because deep down, because of the Incarnation, I know I don't have to remain as I am anymore.

Merry Christmas to each and every one of you.

Take time to wonder.

shalom, matt

Spiritual Enlightenment, part 5

The Increase of the Love, Grace, Forgiveness, and Patience Visible in Your Life.

Seems kind of like a no-brainer, right? If you are growing in Christ then it would make sense to assume that these qualities would become more and more evident in the ongoing rhythm of your life. But you’d be surprised how many people claim that they are growing in Christ and yet none of these most basic and important of elements to a discipled life appear anywhere on their radar.

Let’s think about symphonies for a moment. I’m no expert on classical music, though I do enjoy Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, and Bach on occasion. Most symphonies that I’ve heard rarely begin with gusto: every instrument playing at top volume from the very outset. Most start slowly, quietly, easing the listener into what is to become later on a cacophony of sound and sensation. It may begin with a number of measures from the string section, the woodwinds slowly entering into the picture, followed by the brass instruments, maybe a timpani banging softly, driving the rhythm forward and onward toward the eventual crescendo that peels the faces off the audience members in a tidal wave of sound and musical fury.

I think the increase of love, grace, forgiveness and other assorted fruits of the Spirit taking control of our lives is much like a symphony. It’s not going to happen all at once. I think, and perhaps I’m conjecturing a bit too much here, that we would be crushed if the Spirit rushed in and changed every single thing about us the moment we invited Him in to our lives. At the least, it would steal from us our part in walking alongside Christ, learning from Him how to live. As we follow Him we slowly, sometimes almost imperceptibly, learn how to love better, then with that love ingrained in us more and more we learn how to show grace instead of judgment and wrath. We learn to forgive, then to become more patient with those who irritate or wrong us. Day by day, as we follow after Christ we learn to be like Him and His life becomes our life.

When we see these and other elements of a Spirit-led life we can rest and rejoice in the fact that we are being transformed, enlightened in the way of Christ.

shalom, matt

Diet Coke and Mentos

Okay, so I'll post something spiritual later on today, but for now you have to watch this. Very cool usage of Diet Coke and Mentos. Takes the domino effect to the next level. I hate Diet Coke with a passion, so any and all wasting of it I'm all for. Anyway, check back later on for something that has to do with Jesus.

Everyday

I'm in a video-y mood today, thus the three videos I've posted. This one is perhaps my all-time favorite video ever. It's a great song called "Everyday" by the Dave Matthews Band. The video is just great and has a lot to say about the influence one person can have on the way the world works. Enjoy.

Old Cash

This is back in the day. And just so you know, Luther, the guitar player, always is that stiff looking. Who cares. He carries the freaking rhythm like a beast.

Cash

The fact that this man is dead and not making music anymore is enough to make me very, very, very, very sad.

Spiritual Enlightenment, part 4

The Willingness to Engage in Spiritual Exercises Without Knowing How They Will Work or Even What It Would Mean For Them to Work

I am not a patient man. Seriously, if there was a way for me to finish this post faster I would take it. I want to be done with today’s projects yesterday. Ask my wife, my co-workers, my son (though he wouldn’t understand what you were saying) and they’ll all confirm my lack of patience in most things. Now, given, I’ve become more patient as I’ve gracefully and muscularly aged (those push-ups are actually working; my stomach’s a little doughy, but, hey, you can’t win’em all). I think we want things to slow down as we get older. We spend most of our toddler years in a mad dash to the independence of elementary school; we spend those years in hot pursuit of the magical land of Oz that is our teen years; we spend our teen years in a battle to become adults before we are ready to handle all that comes with that territory. By the time we reach adulthood and push into our “mid-life” we are realizing that one-third of our life is gone and we aren’t sure where it went, but we know that now we have grey hair in our beards, a patch of it on our head, and our belly is starting to bulge a bit more than it used to when we look in the mirror. We live in a hurry and it’s killing us. I am a product of a fast food, one-hour photo, get-it-while-it’s-hot-even-though-it’ll-be-obsolete-as-soon-as-you-buy-it culture that demands speed and baptizes it as a virtue of humanity.

Spiritual exercises, or disciplines, stand over and against this cultural attitude of speed and impatience. Spiritual exercises require discipline (hence the clever moniker “disciplines”) and we have an ingrained aversion to anything that takes discipline. Spiritual growth is like marinating steak. Time is essential to a well-marinated steak. You can’t slap the steak into the marinade, pull it right out and expect it to make any difference in the taste of the steak. You have to let it soak into the meat, the longer the better, usually overnight will suffice. And when it comes time to cook the steak, you can’t turn the grill on high and burn the crap out of the steak. You have to slow cook that baby and let the juices seal themselves in properly (I think I just salivated on my computer). Spiritual exercises are like that. You have to take your time with them. You can’t expect immediate “results.” And, a vast majority of the time you can expect no “results.” The point of the disciplines is not to produce an immediate “result.” Why? Because discipleship, spiritual growth, takes time, perseverance and dedication to becoming like the one the disciplines point you towards and help you become. They cannot become an end in and of themselves. They are simply the means by which we make ourselves available to God in Christ to do with what he will.

At times the disciplines feel like a waste of time. This isn’t a bad thing. The saints of old used to talk about a “holy leisure,” literally, wasting time with God. Sometimes, an Christian history confirms this, the times of exercise that seem the least fruitful are the ones that God has used the most, where our growth reaches a new level of understanding, where we perhaps move beyond trying to feel God, trying to succeed in our spiritual life, and simply rest contented in the knowledge that God is moving us to exactly where he wants us.

Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk and prolific writer on contemplation, prayer, and the like, said that we need not worry when we are beginners in prayer, because we will never be anything but beginners for the entirety of our lives. Our willingness to engage in these exercises without understanding how they “work” or even what they might help accomplish in us, shows that we have grown in our understanding and faith in God as the Perfector of our faith.

shalom, matt

We're Huge in South America

I'm not sure what to make of this, nor how accurate it is, but on this site I have a meter that registers how many visits we get, length of the average stay, number of page views, etc. Once a week I get a detailed report in my email with all the stats. One thing that this meter tracks is the originating continent, country and even time zone of people who visit. As an aside, I received a couple comments several months ago from a guy who lived in Canada (eh?). So there is some accuracy to these reports. Below is the percentage of visits from various countries.
Now, if that were at all legible you would be able to see that we have visits from Chile, Japan, Israel, France, Canada, and Argentina. Apparently we are huge on four continents. And, like, 7 or 8 time zones all together.

Again, not sure how accurate these things are, but that's pretty interesting if it's true.

shalom, matt

Spiritual Enlightenment, part 3

The Acceptance of Your Small Place in Reality

"He who saves one life has saved the world entire." __Ancient Jewish proverb__

Everyone wants to do something big, right? From our earliest days we want to be someone important, someone with something to contribute to the world. We want to be superheroes, firemen, policemen, and fighter pilots. They’re realities seem far more impressive and they are certainly more visible than what most of us end up doing with our lives. My almost-four-year-old thinks that he is Spiderman. He has the costume to prove it. He is old enough to dream big dreams and desire a grandiose life of deeds for the good of humanity. Very few of us ever get to play the big role that we dreamed about all through our childhood.

But all of us have a part to play in the working out of God’s kingdom come here, now, today.

Here’s the problem with looking for the grandiose task: we miss the everyday, commonplace, run of the mill tasks that make up the warp and woof of life. We are not talking about career choices here, but our day-to-day life tasks that involve our families, friends, communities, and even our enemies. All of us have a part to play, a role that is all our own. It is neither more nor less grand than anyone else’s task. It simply is what it is.

Look, here’s the thing: we are small in the grand scheme of things, a blip on the eternal radar scope. And that is being generous. When you are dealing with the scope of human history and the unending beginning and ending of eternal “time,” it puts your place in this world in perspective. Here’s the rub: you still play an important part, no matter how infinitesimal small it may seem. If you and I can come to grips with our place in reality then it alters how we see our daily routines, daily work, and the daily grind of the ins and outs of life. It all takes on a fantastic new meaning that somehow, in some small way, perhaps unbeknownst to us, changes the world.

shalom, matt

Dude...

This is ridiculous on so many levels. Say what you want about Beck, this takes talent to pull off.